Starting a business is an achievement, but maintaining one is the larger challenge. Standard challenges that face every business owner include building a brand, accessing capital, developing an infrastructure of people and equipment, and advertising and marketing, especially online advertising and marketing, marketing and advertising that uses the Internet to deliver promotional marketing messages to consumers. Over 1 billion people worldwide surf the Internet every day. As a consequence, businesses throughout the world engage in online advertising as a means to showcase products and services.
Online advertising includes email marketing, search engine marketing, display advertising, such as web banner advertising, mobile advertising, and social media advertising. Social media advertising uses social networking services, platforms to build social networks or social relations among people who share interests, activities, backgrounds, or real-life connections through user pages, for advertising campaigns via posting, placing messages on a website. Although social networking services offer paid advertising opportunities, business owners routinely establish user pages through selected social networking services and post content to the user pages that serves a commercial purpose of creating interest by prospective customers in the products, services, expertise, knowledge, or qualifications of the given business, for the commercial opportunity of prospective customers purchasing products or services from the business owner.
The use by businesses of user pages of social networking services for posting content having a commercial purpose for creating a commercial opportunity for the businesses associated with the user pages presents a problem of creating and posting content to the user webpages. It is one thing to have a social network user page, and another thing entirely to post content to the user page. Although many businesses create social network user pages with the good intentions of posting content on a regular basis for creating commercial impressions in users accessing those webpages, content posting is routinely inconsistent, inappropriate, or not made at all. Although content posting to social network user webpages presents a unique advertising opportunity for business owners, actually creating and posting content has proven especially challenging, in that it is either not done, not done consistently, or done ineffectively. This problem of posting online advertising posts to webpages of social networking services, a problem specifically arising in the realm of computer networks, is due to a variety of reasons, which can include the lack of skill or time on the part of businesses to create and post content, the lack of capital to hire a professional to create and post content, and the lack of the skill or ability to create and post content. Businesses often delegate “social media updating”, i.e. posting content to webpages of social networking services, including all creative messaging, photography, and customer communications, to an employee. However, employee unreliability, employee turnover, and the lack of employee training and supervision routinely results in stagnant, inconsistent, and ineffective content creating and posting. When the business owner hires an outside social media firm, often at considerable expense, to perform the social media updating on behalf of the business, similar issues routinely arise. In each scenario, relinquishing control of a social media advertising campaign to an employee or a third party is risky to a business, and can cause the business to lose its competitive advantage, and to capitalize on a powerful marking tool, online social media advertising.